Now that the first trailer for Mortal Kombat II dropped earlier this week, director Simon McQuoid’s free to talk about how this follow-up builds on the 2021 reboot.
Talking to IGN, McQuoid opened up on ensuring the second movie delivered on the promise of the first movie, namely having the real fighting tournament that features franchise characters beating the hell out of each other. Said characters include the returning Sonya Blade, Raiden, and Liu Kang, and the newly introduced Kitana, Shao Kahn, and Baraka. Oh, and Johnny Cage, now stepping into the role Cole Young did in the previous movie and operating as a POV character into this krazy, khaotic world full of lizard men, mad scientists, and ageless fighters.
Of these newcomers, McQuoid called them “wild and otherworldly, and when you’ve got characters like that, you have to swing for the fences.” Such swings involve taking the characters to locations from the games like like Hell (where Scorpion resides) and Edenia, the home realm of Kitana, Jade, and Shao Kahn. According to McQuoid, those trips bring “massive scale” to the film, particularly when it comes to the film’s IMAX version. For the format heads, he teased that cut will have “little story moments and little gems for the super fans…that you won’t see in the regular theatrical version. I just wanted to try and innovate and use the format in a way that really makes it a rewarding experience for the audience.”
Speaking of the audience, it made that first Mortal Kombat a big hit for HBO Max and its simultaneous theatrical-streaming release. If there’s any hope of a third movie, it’s entirely up to the folks seeing it, and the film’s been made as a complete experience either way. “There’s a coda, but [New Line] doesn’t expect to make a sequel. We have to earn that right,” said producer Todd Garner. “We’re not going to give you some post-sequence to be like, ‘Oh, this is going to happen in the sequel.’ We’ll do more if we’re given the opportunity, but we don’t want to assume that we can.”
Mortal Kombat II hits theaters October 24.
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